Pot Kettle Black
by thestylus01
Summary: Gretchen Janeway should be better at both absences and homecomings by now.


Pot Kettle Black  
by the stylus

A not my typewriter story: _I myself have found a real rival in myself._

* * *

I broke a plate once. Shattered it, actually. I don't know why this event should stand out from the press of all my memories, but now when I think about my marriage to Edward it is those ragged pieces that I see. I remember the sharp sound it made when it hit the wall of the kitchen with a satisfaction that I ought to reserve for the laughter of children and the warmth of a bath after a long day of physical labor. No one else was in the house at the time, and it felt like I could briefly, finally scream in that uncontrolled motion of hurling the empty plate at the blank wall.

It was to have been Edward's plate, but he'd missed dinner for the hundredth time because of something that no longer is important enough to remember. The girls, I think, were at a school function. I cleaned it up immediately, of course. No matter what the PR lieutenants say, Starfleet is still a military organization; and military families never waste anything. It went back into the recycler and all the fragments, pieces, and shards were pulled apart into their component atoms.

I hadn't thought about that evening in a long time, not since years before Edward died. And I probably never would have remembered if something hadn't changed. But Voyager got home today. Home-home. Earth-home, not just the Alpha Quadrant. Three days ago we got the news that they were back on our side of the galaxy, and since then the guest wing at Headquarters has been silent with the sound of hundreds of people holding their breath. Today we all migrated to a large room and they appeared in a shower of blue: wave after wave of mostly unfamiliar faces above outdated uniforms--all a little stunned, a little unsure, looking to each other for cues about how to handle their past come rising up to greet them. They were beautiful people, and I mean this in a purely aesthetic way since I know very few of them, even by reputation. They had an aura about them that lent them a beauty like old, marble statues. A rugged, weather-beaten grace, if you want to wax poetic about it. Looking at them, I was proud of my daughter. If she had managed to create this, I thought, or even just to hold it together, that was something special.

She beamed down in the last wave. She is so much like her father in that respect. When the shimmering stopped and she stood there before me, whole, I realized why these strangers around me were mostly frozen to the floor. The reality of physical presence was a shock to the system. We had all worked so hard at letting go that we had no idea where to pick back up.

Owen broke the awkward moment by stepping forward with a big smile and giving an "official" welcome to the crew of the intrepid USS Voyager. Applause followed, and lots of nervous laughter; then, finally, some genuine smiles. Kathryn stepped forward to shake his hand, turned to gesture at her crew and then cracked a joke about the Admiral's penchant for losing hair while she was out of spacedock. We all laughed again, easier, and I waited for the tearful reunions to commence. But her crew didn't move, and I couldn't understand it until I saw her give them all a small nod. They dispersed instantly, moving off to family, friends, to whomever had come at Starfleet's call to greet them. A few, some of the ones who looked like no species I recognized, moved off into a corner by themselves.

I had plenty of time to observe, you see, since Kathryn got stopped by every person she passed. 'Fleet officers wanted to congratulate her, her crewmen wanted to introduce her to their parents or spouses. I watched the motions the other families made. I wasn't sure what I wanted.

"Mom?" Suddenly she was standing beside me, touching my shoulder. She was old. I hadn't been prepared for that-- for the lines at the corners of her eyes and across her forehead. For the wisps of grey at her hairline. There is something decidedly unnatural about your child being old.

Her hair was much shorter than it had been when she'd left. Kathryn had always had long hair, no matter how impractical it had been. She looked naked above her uniform without it.

"Mom?" A little more forceful, to bring me out of my trance. I hugged her, hard. The other families were hugging, too. In my arms, with that stranger's face looking away from me, she was the same. Slender, strong, small. Oh, how her sister teased her for being the shortest one in the family.

We made small talk after that. It wasn't quite so hard as it might have been if the MIDAS array hadn't given us some brief communication. It had just been the basics released to the families, but it was something. It let us imagine that we knew each other, at least a bit.

We've been playing this game for a long time, longer than the Delta Quadrant. Kathryn: her father's daughter. That's what we always laughed about, the group of mothers, when we watched our children from a distance. There were some who said "Oh, my Mary is just like me." I was always in the group who said, "My Kathryn is the spitting image of her father." Either way, we would all chuckled politely, because wasn't it _funny_ to see someone's faults in someone else? And because, deep down, we all thought our children would find a way not to turn out like their parents.

At home she smiles with her lips pressed close together and stands in the middle of rooms so as not to disturb the space she doesn't recognize. I moved everything around after the fall three years ago so I wouldn't have to stretch and reach so much, or stand on precarious stools, the motion that resulted in my hip shattering in the first place. She asks after Phoebe and scratches the ears of Blight, the little pup who found my door, half-starved, the season when the environets malfunctioned and all the corn died of thirst. She's a full-sized mutt now, with a tail that won't let me keep knickknacks on low tables, but she's been good company. When I bring the coffee into the den and sit down in the armchair, facing Kathryn across the low table, everything is suspended again, as it was in the bay when all our lost children beamed back from the dead. My hand trembles.

I got a stranger back; but then, I sent one out. Still, she's my daughter. I notice her eyes on my mug, quivering, and I set it on the table, much too hard. The noise makes us both jump.

"You know, Mom, I always admired you." Perhaps it is an apology for staring. It doesn't make me feel any better.

She forges on. "I always admired your ability to be happy in whatever situation you found yourself. Even when Dad was gone for such long stretches, you found a way to keep us a family. I didn't realize how much work that was, then. I think I do now." Her gaze is unwavering. I have the disconcerting feeling that she has turned me inside out and is watching everything happen inside me. I am a little bit indignant: I ought to know my children better than they know me.

I stand, abruptly. Her face registers surprise. "I'm not really in the mood for coffee. I'm going to get something else. Can I bring you anything?" She shakes her head. I feel her eyes on me as I move to the kitchen and concentrate on keeping my spine stiff.

When I come back, a glass of Beaujolais in hand, she has moved out onto the wooden porch and is leaning on the railing facing out over the fields, high with grain and corn. She glances at the wine and then away but says nothing. Her face in the late afternoon sun has lines that I remember from the mirror. I feel very old. "Kathryn?"

"Hmm?" She does not turn from her contemplation of the horizon.

I meant to tell her that I was proud of her. Instead, I say, "I broke a plate, once."

She does not turn to me, but I can see her expression change. "What do you mean?"

"Your father was late for dinner. Several days late. You girls were at a school something-or-other and when I saw that empty place setting for what felt like the thousandth time in six months, I just couldn't stand it anymore. I threw the plate as hard as I could at the wall and watched it come apart." As an afterthought: "It made a lovely sound."

"Yes," she says. "I bet it did."

She has too much of us both in her: her father and me. Neither Edward nor I was raised Traditionalist; it just seemed like something stable we could give the girls. I think we both hoped, though we never talked about it, that they'd find a way to get past us. All parents hope that for their children, don't they? Phoebe managed not to care just enough; with her art and her new husband, she's resettled somewhere else, somewhere she can breathe. She made it out. But Kathryn and I...

I dreamed of her for those first weeks after her ship was declared missing. All sorts of awful scenarios would come to me at night and I would wake tangled in the damp sheets, cursing myself for not having learned in this many decades of being a 'Fleet wife, a 'Fleet mother— for not having learned not to dream. After the memorial service, I still didn't believe she was gone. Not really. Not for a long time. I quit dreaming; but sometimes her face would float up in my vision as I was going about some perfectly ordinary task. And she was always smiling, relaxed, a Kathryn I'm not sure I ever saw after she was old enough to spend hours solving equations for her father. In my mind, they settled on a planet, somewhere, and she married someone handsome and just the right height so that she never hurt her neck kissing him. And they had children, of course, who were inquisitive and daring like Kathryn had been but who cried sometimes instead of bearing up under the pressure.

She thinks I don't understand, that because I have not longed for a life in the sky this Indiana horizon has been enough space. And now she is here, close enough to touch, standing on my porch keeping watch for the darkness. "What will you do now?" I ask, because she is a woman I do not know. I wonder if she is picturing her ship's hull cresting bright against the dark Eastern rim of the sky.

She half-turns, considering. "I don't know. I hadn't thought that far ahead. We didn't quite know what to expect, even with the messages coming through. I had planned on having a harder fight for my crew." She chuckles. "I had planned on being court martialed."

"Not Starfleet's returning hero?" I ask, dryly.

"Certainly not." Her smile is equally wry.

"I know they've given you an apartment in San Francisco, but you're certainly welcome to stay here as long as you like. You know that?"

"Yes. I know." Polite, diplomatic. I want to shake us both.

"Kathryn, I--" My mind is blank. What do you say to your daughter, the hero, who is suddenly much older and wiser than you? I stare into my wine which is glimmering in the reddening light.

"Mom, it's ok." She faces me now, and puts her hand on my shoulder in a gesture that means: I will make it all right; do not worry. This is how she reassures her crew, I suddenly realize: the green ensigns and the crewmen on lower decks who have been in space too long, probably even her darkly handsome XO. It takes all my willpower not to shrug off that hand. "It will be ok. It's just...going to take some time."

Damn you, Edward. For being late and coming home with your beautiful face and soft hands and knowing just where to touch me to say, I'm sorry. For the soft seduction of the lies we are still telling. Damn all of us.

* * *

Fin 

All characters are the property of their creators. The author makes no profit from this work.


End file.
